Our Tender Treatment Of South Africa: What Are The Facts?

July 25, 1986|By Russell Baker, (copyright) 1986, New York Times News Service.

NEW YORK — One of the mysteries is why President Reagan is soft on South Africa. Here is a government apparently operating under the fatal delusion that Nazi Germany did things right. It now has more people imprisoned without due process of law than the U.S. Immigration Service and exercises a press censorship that makes the Soviet Union`s seem sissified by comparison.

Does Reagan know something he cannot reveal? Lyndon Johnson used to say that the president is the only person who has all the facts, so shouldn`t be casually criticized for pursuing policies that look nutty to you and me.

Still, it`s unlikely that Reagan himself has facts that, if known to the rest of us, would make his policy look wise.

Unlike Johnson, Reagan never claims to have all the facts. Indeed, he has very few facts, and the few he has are often not facts at all. This does not worry Reagan, nor should it, since there isn`t much he can do about it. He is not a fact man.

Jimmy Carter was a fact man, and look where it got him. Reagan, whose fact supply is composed almost entirely of facts that turn out not to be facts, remains so popular with his countrymen that an entire school of journalism has sprung up, dedicated to answering the question: ``Why is President Reagan so popular despite his personal fact shortage?``

The answer does not require a cover-length story by Time. It is simply that Americans are tired of facts and delighted to have a President who proves you can be the most important person in the world without having more than seven or eight facts at your command.

One reason for the national fatigue with facts probably stems from Johnson`s insistence on their importance. Suppose Johnson really did have all the facts: They didn`t save him from the delusion that he could make Ho Chi Minh say uncle, did they?

The value of the fact, we have learned, is not all it`s cracked up to be. As next week`s newly discovered scientific facts on how to live to 110 will surely contradict last week`s newly discovered facts about how to live to 110, the facts upon which the governing classes base decisions are often less factual than they sound.

I go on about this because of Donald Regan`s silly remarks last week about the President`s South Africa policy. Regan, the White House chief of staff, was trying to create an impression that there were persuasive facts to explain the administration`s softness.

In doing so, he suggested that putting the economic thumbscrews to South Africa was a bad idea because it might result in American women having their diamond supplies cut off. Regan, whose gift for the infelicitous observation has made him the White House`s gift to satire, can only have been desperately struggling to invent a factual explanation for policy when he unloaded this suggestion that the White House prefers concentration camps to having American womanhood denied access to fresh jewelry.

With a President unconcerned about facts, it is the duty of assistants like Regan to seem concerned about them. While the public may like having a President indifferent to facts, psychic comfort also requires assurance that its insouciant President be surrounded by beavers able to supply twice as many facts as he needs when he snaps his fingers.

From this flows the modern governmental myth of the brilliant and usually ``hard-nosed`` White House staff. The unglamorous truth is that White House staff people are often just intensely competitive, game-playing careerists who would do almost anything to get an office close to the president`s.

The question remains: Why the reluctance to go to a harsher policy toward South Africa? There must be some essential fact known to somebody in Washington that keeps us behaving tenderly to a government obnoxious in the eyes of the world.

What can it be? That South Africa has the H-bomb and secretly threatens to use it?

Yes, I know South Africa`s is an anticommunist government, but so was Nazi Germany`s.